A Brief History of Rhinebeck Gardens

When Gail Wittwer-Laird and I finally settled down to design the garden at 71 Livingston Street, we were already deep into the context of Rhinebeck’s historic district.  We had done our research and set ourselves a commitment to honor the Hudson River’s landscape past. 

In my Rhinebeck neighborhood – the residential streets of the historic district – two-story houses with a basement, attic, small front and large backyard are common.  The most important houses often anchor the corners, with the exception of Chestnut Street with its grand houses and very deep setbacks.  The largest houses in the village probably sold off surrounding land at one time, the only remaining evidence being the occasional adjacent barn.

A House On Chestnut Street

Livingston Street is a typical mid-19th century village street.  A scattering of houses – some earlier, some later, some modest, some more affluent – line both sides of the street.  The houses may differ, but most lots are uniform. They are long rectangular plots, the house set close to the street, perhaps a barn, shed or garage tucked in the rear.  Because this pattern was ubiquitous in the mid-to-late 19th century, there is a body of literature both of the period and later to guide our thinking.

We started with the earliest 19th century designer of houses and landscapes, Andrew Jackson Downing. His books – A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Victorian Cottage Residences, and The Architecture of Country Houses – were enormously influential as the primary texts for the design and landscape of Hudson River country homes.  

Downing's Victorian Cottage Residences

By the late 19th century large landholders of great wealth were building elaborate gardens in the Italian style; gardens planned as outdoor drawing rooms, completely isolated from the natural areas surrounding the estate houses.  Balustraded terraces rose four to five feet above the lawns below, which linked the surrounding fields and meadows.  

The terraces were accessible only from several rooms of the house, and were to be used solely by family and guests.  The remaining large open areas were approached through a gate, past a gatehouse and up a long drive.

      

A Grand Italian Terrace

The landowners employed architects and builders, and their craftsmen learned new techniques and styles.  Craftsmen and artisans employed in the creation of these gardens soon modified and reproduced them for village houses and began to work for village homeowners of wealth and substance. 

Downing’s ideas eventually filtered down to owners of the smallest village houses.  He would have had an even greater influence had he not died in 1852 at age 36 in a fire on a river steamer, leaving the field clear for Olmsted and Vaux.

       

Today, Downing is best known (and well loved) for Victorian Cottage Residences, first published in 1842 and succeeded by several editions.  It became a guidebook for owners of small village residences, laying out in detail how the properties should be used, down to specific planting plans and maintenance expectations of family members. 

The ornamental part of the garden would lie in front of planted trellises, with the working garden discretely in the rear.  The vines he recommended for covering the trellis are ones we still use today: several varieties of honeysuckle, clematis, wisteria and roses.  His lists of suitable trees, shrubs and flowers would still serve today’s gardener well. 

A Downing Plan for a Village Garden

The kitchen garden was hidden behind the trellis.  Downing knew that the more common vegetables could be purchased as cheaply as they could be raised and recommended growing only the earliest and most delicate fruits and vegetables –strawberries, asparagus, peaches – and devoted less than one-third of the area of a standard lot to the kitchen garden. 

In the early 19th century people of means bought their plants from nurseries, but many households depended on traveling salesmen.  Flower agents used to canvas country towns from house to house.  Sometimes they came with a catalog, but often they had only a single plant.  Chinese wisterias and fringetrees were sold this way, as were clematis jackmanii, which could be seen to adorn porches up and down the block.  In Concord, Thoreau recalled a certain rhododendron sweeping his village, sold to all by a single agent. 

Downing was a proponent of bedding masses of low-growing flowers in patterns – a distinctly Victorian preference, now almost completely abandoned. You might still see it at classic racetracks like Belmont, where the bedding concept was in full force as annuals stayed in place for the duration of the racing season.  

My first professional job was at Belmont, where I marked up huge rolls of plans with an X in color for each of the thousands of red, white and blue petunias which would then be grown in vast greenhouses in preparation for the June planting. 

In the literature of village gardens, nobody superseded Downing until the1920’s when Fletcher Steele started writing about the small garden.  As with Downing, this was not Steele’s primary work; he was a designer of very grand gardens with a distinct turn towards modernism.  The stunning Blue Staircase at Naumkeag alone is worth a trip to the Berkshires.  

The Blue Staircase at Naumkeag

His wonderful 1924 book Design in the Little Garden positions the home garden as a withdrawal from the outer world. Seclusion is the first and most important of garden qualities; unlike Downing, Steele believed it was not possible to live at ease in a front yard.  He could not conceive of anyone bringing a book and a rocking chair to a front porch.  

Steele would be puzzled by the uses of front porches today and its public quality. In some Rhinebeck houses the steps of the porch is a like a city stoop; it is an invitation to stop and chat or a place to sit and watch the world go by.  The raised porch however implies a degree of privacy; if you see a neighbor reading a book you would not be inclined to disturb her. 

Gail and I were captivated by Design in the Little Garden; the example Steele uses could have been lifted straight from Livingston Street.  He creates a fictional block, Maple Cove Avenue.  Three imaginary houses, Numbers 11,13, and 15 are set on uniform lots, 75’ x 125’, but the landscape in each is treated differently.  

            

Design in the Little Garden

They each incorporate the necessities of the time: a garage sometimes in the front, sometimes in the back at the end of a long driveway; privacy; a drying yard; space for vegetables and fruit; an assortment of porches in front and/or back; some lawn with hedges and flower borders.  No. 13 has a formal garden, No. 11 an informal garden and No. 15 an example of what not to do – the house set far back and too much of the lot opened widely to public view.  Each house has its lessons about what works and what doesn’t.

A Dooryard Garden

The front dooryard garden, almost an anachronism today, was a staple of early gardens.  In colonial times the dooryard garden was always fenced and gated.  It was carefully cultivated and enclosed the most prized flowers.  Starting with early narcissus there were always a few red and yellow single tulips, followed by phlox, the only native American plant.  The most glorious was often the early red ‘piny’ as peonies were then (and sometimes still) called.  

There might be a few shrubs, a lilac and perhaps viburnum.  By the 19th century spirea and deutzia had arrived from Japan as had flowering quince and cherries.  Almost all these flowers can be seen in gardens today, but the spireas and deutzias have fallen out of fashion.  In a dooryard garden like the photograph above, plants were left growing in one spot for a very long time eventually shouldering one another aside like children growing up in the same family. 

Small gardens everywhere in the world are almost always hospitable. They are domestic in scale and tailored to the needs and wants of the owners.

This was our goal for 71 Livingston Street.  If there was an early garden here, all traces of it were gone. It was a bare plateau with only a few of the easiest of plants to grow – hostas and daylilies.  The maples and black walnuts planted at the time the house was built in 1865 remained on the perimeter.  This was all we had.  We started with a clean slate.

Designing The Garden

 Over the years my gardens have tended to look alike.  I have my favorite plants and use them so often they have become that hated word -- my ‘signature.’

To cast a fresh eye I asked Gail Wittwer-Laird to join me on this garden.  An academically-trained landscape architect with a few years in the gardens of Italy, an adventurous eye and endless patience, she is my perfect partner.  No detail was too small to fuss over.

To begin, our base map was a standard block and lot plan available from any municipality.  Then we did our ground-truthing -– checking to see that the information was accurate.  Gail began by measuring, photographing and laying out a plot plan with the major features correctly located.

The Side Yard, Before We Started

The back yard was a blank slate, used in the past only as a dog run, the dogs kept safe and deer kept out by a 5’ tall hog wire fence.  It was in deep shade, a row of black walnuts to the west, Norway maples to the east. The most beautiful aspect of the site is the way the light filters through the black walnuts, dappling most of the garden.  As with many great beauties, deception lies at her heart.  In this case, the black walnuts became an intractable problem, turning the prospective garden into a war zone as the walnuts came crashing down in their late-summer season.

From the beginning I wanted a simple, elegant plan for the garden, somewhat formal in character and in keeping with the flat rectangle we were given.  But the longing for simplicity was muddled by my early use of three different areas for sitting.  

 

The First Sitting Area

The first was a sunny spot on the western property line, directly under the walnuts.  The second spot, also under walnuts, was at the rear of the property in front of a recovered bed.  The third, walnut-free, was under the Norway maples on the eastern property line. The most important sitting area, off the kitchen, did not yet exist.  It was a doormat of small concrete slabs, wet with runoff from the roofline, also under walnuts.

As for our program, there were no activities to accommodate, no vegetables to harvest, no sports, no water, no play equipment, no sandbox, no swing set.  Visiting children could play hide and seek, find treasure with metal detectors, ride bikes on the street, or hold tea parties.

For terraces, we experimented with a series of pods determined by the need to move around the garden as the walnuts grew and threatened to fall: function over form. But given our predilections we chose form over function and settled on an axial pattern – aesthetics over utility.   

We Start The Terrace

We started with a 22’ x 15’ paved rectangle off the rear of the house, and a false perspective created by narrowing the brick-edged beds as they moved towards the back of the garden.  A firm horizontal line running from the center of the house straight through to the rear of the garden kept us on course.

One of the decisions firmly set from the very beginning was the focus on a large lawn.  There is nothing quite as calming as a long, cool, green lawn, and in my dreams I saw protective borders, portable chairs and table, arbors and croquet sets, a writer's hut at the bottom of the garden – all very Virginia Woolf.  But if a lawn is to invite you to linger, it has to be intimate, to have a sense of enclosure.  Unless you are blessed with a river or a lake you will have to build your own enclosures – buildings, walls or shrub borders.

The Lawn at Bellefield in Hyde Park

This key decision was – to be polite – counterintuitive.  Some might even say misbegotten.  Most gardens today are planned to remove as much grass as possible minimizing both labor and water consumption, then planted bed by bed, pocket by pocket as the mood strikes.  We held onto the idea of a long, wide swath of lawn, and developed the garden as a single encompassing design, visible from the moment you enter. 

A large panel of lawn – or a green garden -- is no different than others in the need for privacy and a bit of seclusion. We started at the boundary lines and worked inward.  Our borders are generously deep, larger on the east border than the west as our carefully plotted centerline when laid out did not divide the property equally.  Nonetheless our borders are generous enough to mask the discrepancy on the east, while opening up the views worth capturing on the west.

Gail and I talked and plotted and planned and sketched for almost a year before we put the plan out to bid.  Our goal was to install the woody plants, the trees and shrubs, in the fall of 2015.  The herbaceous material would wait for the following spring.

Plans flew back and forth courtesy of Autocad and UPS.  The design was completed and priced down to the last detail before a shovel hit the ground. This was a process Gail and I were both familiar with, having worked on public parks together.  Now the process was scaled down to an average building lot.

After more than two summers daydreaming and a year planning, work began.  By the end of 2015 the beds were planted and edged in brick, gates and friendly fences appeared, a terrace was set, an arbor and trellis were added, an old well house shored up, a table and chairs delivered.

A Corner of the Garden Today

Although I live alone I am not the sole arbiter of this garden. There is large cast of opinionated contributors: Gail Wittwer-Laird, landscape architect and longtime colleague; Natalka Chas, planting designer who had worked for years on my prior garden; Dennis Gendron of Twin Brooks Gardens, our principal contractor; Delfino Martinez, master stonemason; Brian Tamm and Dan Frank, superb carpenters, and Daniel Horne who takes care of the garden as if it were his own. 

As all gardens do, this one ranges back and forth in time through past gardens and considers why we build gardens, the importance of place, why we long for calm green spaces, what we see in them, their poetry and their place in the imagination.  And always the season ahead; the conviction that if you plant bulbs in the fall you will be here in the spring to see them bloom.